OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem (techcrunch.com)

NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster recently announced new proofs related to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, a significant challenge in theoretical mathematics and one of the seven Millennium Prize problems. His findings, developed alongside Anthropic's Levent Alpöge and using AI models Codex and Claude, highlight a controversial episode where OpenAI allegedly used prior knowledge of Buckmaster’s work to quickly publish their own proof of the problem. This situation has sparked a debate within the AI/ML community regarding ethical practices in research collaboration and the potential for AI systems to unintentionally access and repurpose human-generated insights. The controversy centers on the timing and nature of OpenAI’s calculations, which reportedly involved 300 billion output tokens and approximately $22.5 million in compute resources, leading many to question the ethics of leveraging advanced computational power to achieve priority on such significant discoveries. Buckmaster expressed concerns about the integrity of the research process, particularly around the use of Codex during his work. OpenAI has countered allegations by asserting that while they may have indirectly benefited from de-identified user data, they did not access any specific user work in their own proof. This incident raises critical questions about competition within the AI-driven research landscape and could redefine the norms governing AI's role in scientific inquiry.